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attitude” amounts to being a “child of the world” (Weltkind), 20 whereas phenomenologists,after having renounced this “worldly” childhood, receive the new life of the “children inthe realm of pure spirit” (Kinder im Reich des reinen Geistes). 21 These two modes ofbeing do not coexist in the common sphere of merely different but still comparableattitudes; the passage from the one to the other implies a change of paradigm that Husserldoes not hesitate to call by the Nietzschean name of Umwertung (“reversal of values”). 22To neutralize a general theory about the world and the scientific attitude related to it, isin itself not a matter for neutrality or indifference, but one for taking up a stance, not withregard to the contents of a “thesis” or theory, or any other “conviction” whatsoever, butwith regard to the sense given by the philosophical subject to its own functional “I.” Byrecognizing itself as the primordial origin of any phenomenal sense, transcendentalconsciousness does not, properly speaking, return from the “world” to its own “self”;rather, it learns to consider all forms of subjectivity and self-ness hitherto known as somany incarnations of the old philosophical Adam, who has to die in order to be rebornin the stream of the transcendental life which incessantly springs from the centre ofabsolute consciousness. 23However universal the structures of transcendental subjectivity are intended to be,Husserl’s approach, in Ideas I, is still characterized by a rather elitist vision of phenomenologicalrationality, as far as its concrete realization is concerned. Given the absenceof logical continuity between the methods used by the “worldly” sciences and those of thephenomenological epoché, the latter will necessarily be attained by a still further reducednumber of persons than the different forms of pre-transcendental theoretic knowledge. Inthis sense, the “philosophical conversion” involved in transcendental phenomenologyseems less akin to the authentically Christian notion of “rebirth” than to its gnostic equivalent,which considers itself as a form of knowledge reserved to the “illuminated few.”At the same time, despite the empirically small number of transcendental phenomenologists,their work cannot simply be reduced to being ‘one activity among others.’Husserl’s indignation -- when he became aware that phenomenology was being characterizedas a conventional, “bourgeois” (bürgerliche) profession, or even as one of the“objective sciences” -- is felt by him in direct proportion to the “difference in value”(Wertunterschied) 24 between the phenomenological attitude and all other forms of nonphenomenologicalexistence, a difference which Husserl conceives of as “the greatestpossible one.” 25 Thus, the radical incompatibility of the phenomenological epoché withthe value-system of the “natural,” “objective” attitude accounts both for the absoluteclaims made for transcendental phenomenology and the extreme rarity of its existentialrealization.“Factual History” Versus “Hidden History”During the “static” period of Husserl’s elaboration of phenomenology, the dualisticstructure of his approach concerns the sphere of subjectivity in its “transcendental20See Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist, Hua XXXII (Dordrecht/ Boston/ London: KluwerAcademic Publishers, 2001), 7.21See Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. ZweiterTeil (1921-1928), Hua XIV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 466, and Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie,Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, Hua VIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959), 123.22Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie, 63, § 31.23See Husserl, Erste Philosophie, Zweiter Teil, 121.24See Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, 139.25Ibid.225